Why They Are Deprecated

We're trying to standardize on GNOME Online Accounts and services that can be accessed via GVFS. This has a number of benefits:

GNOME offers much more consumer-friendly services, like Google Drive. Asking casual users to set up an Amazon S3 account is too high a bar.

A GNOME user would expect that their online accounts would be accessible. And would be surprised by new kinds of storage accounts only accessible from the Backups program.

We can query the service for how much free space is available (which is used to decide if we need to make room for new backups by deleting old ones).

Any service improvements are shared with all of GNOME.

Avoiding duplicity-specific service support means that we can potentially offer other backends other than duplicity.

How to Enable Anyway

If you want to restore from one, simply start a restore and select it from the location drop down. If you want to back up to one, open dconf-editor and navigate to /org/gnome/deja-dup and change the backend key to either gcs, openstack, rackspace, or s3.

When you next open Déjà Dup, you can now see a new option in the storage location drop down.

Will Support Disappear One Day?

Eventually, we might drop support for backing up to them. And then later, maybe we'll drop support for restoring from them too (but you can always use duplicity directly to restore or download the files locally first and then use Déjà Dup).

But there are no plans right now to drop support. For the foreseeable future, they are staying. They are just hidden by default.

Supporting More Services

All newly supported cloud services should be first added to gnome-online-accounts and then exposed in Déjà Dup after some testing.